Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/21/funny-video-imagines-zoom-call.html
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Thanks for this - it was great to start the day with a laugh!
“256 colors, Wow!”
Gotta share it with the younglings in my family who still believe things were easier in the past. All those cables, codes, and slow connections are my version of stories about walking uphill to school (both ways). 
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It’s a funny video, because I did videoconferencing using ISDN videoconference thing and the set up was “interesting”.
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I realize I shouldn’t harp on the technical aspects of parody videos like this, but was it possible to fade-out the DOS prompt as we see at 2:42?
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That nailed the tech, graphics, and tone. Only it would have been called: zOOm!
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Corporate video conferencing systems actually existed in the 80s, though I have no idea how they transmitted. ISDN for control and satellite for video?
As a child I got parked in a defense contractor’s dedicated room for it for an hour or two. I got the impression it was very expensive and almost never used.
A decade later I experienced the similar setup at another defense contractor, and it was indeed very expensive and almost never used, basically only a status symbol used for talking to government and military bigwigs.
Not long after I used CU-SeeMe for the first time. I was giddy with excitement (we’re living in the future!), but the novelty wore off quick. I’d like to go back in time to tell myself how the Skype ringtone literally makes me cringe, Pavlovian style, even when I hear it in fiction.
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No, but I think it was made to look more like a typical camera fade out. There’s more fade outs throughout the video, like the phone fading out at 3:07.
All in all… yeah, that’s kind of what setting up shit was like back in the day.
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If only installing a soundblaster card was this easy in the early 90s lol
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pretty sure nobody involved in this video was alive in 1988.
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They used ISDN, getting a rate of 128kbps using both lines.
In point to point case you used ISDN switched network and made two long distance calls.
In a multiroom conference you had to register and every node had to make the calls to the hub.
On the other hand these systems could be used to transmit high quality audio. (probabily was 128k .mp2 or was already mp3?)
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Parody videos like this get details wrong where some features are too advanced for the time and others not advanced enough. I dealt with a lot of modems in the early 1980s and I have never see one that used a 9 volt battery. Also, there were not modems in 1988 that did not automatically dial the phone. You would not have picked up the phone, dialed, and then heard a voice prompt to enter a number and then heard modem noise. The modem would have dialed the number and connected. You would usually hear the modem boise through a speaker on the modem. Also a lot of modems didn’t use touch tone dialing (they used pulses like a rotary phone sent) because touch tone was not available in all areas and also cost extra in some places.
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Clearly the Zoom modem was an early version of Artie Ziff’s Modem Noise Converter …
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MP3 was initially released in 1993
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I remember shopping for an MP3 player before the iPod came out. It was a features war with an ever increasing number of buttons (including shift buttons so buttons could do 2 or 3 functions) that made the things look like scientific calculators. Then the iPod came out and I struggled to recall what all those buttons ever did.
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I was alway a big fan of the MP3 decoding CD players.
Got one of those with a 240 second antiskip, and a 700MB CD-R can hold shittons of music and audiobooks if you are judicious with encoding settings. Like downmixing to mono, using 32kHz sample rate, and using a 64kbps bitrate since you only have to deal with one channel instead of two.
IIRC I was able to get both all of the Harry Potter audiobooks and the Chronicles of Narnia on a single CD-R
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Late early 2000s give or take, I found a CD player like that and went nuts making long play mix tapes. They were great for burning man, just pop a disc in and let it play all day. Fun times.
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Yes. At that part of the video I was wishing they’d used a rotary phone for authenticity. I was still a kid, but we only had rotary phones at our house in 1988. I think it was the next year before you even had to dial more than 4 digits for in-town calls.
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But is it available for my Apple ][c?
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Ha. That ain’t Joey, that’s Weird Paul.
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